The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership

by Al Sharpton

  Normally, when we do these marches, everybody is trying to get around me, almost knocking me down, so they can get into the camera shots. But the next time we went out there after the threat, no one wanted to stand next to me. We marched for several more weeks without incident—aside from the vicious hatred—so I began to allow myself to relax a little.

  On January 12, 1991, we went to Bensonhurst for a march, the twenty-ninth week we had done so, starting the weekend after Yusuf was killed. We pulled into the schoolyard where we usually gathered. The police always cordoned it off to keep the hate crowds away from us while we set up. Usually, they would line us up and form two walls of police protection, one on each side, so that there would be officers on each side to protect us. I was in the car with Moses Stewart, Yusuf’s father, who by then had joined NAN. When someone tapped on the window and said we were ready to go, Moses and I got out of the car and headed toward the front of the line to lead the marchers. This was called the “frozen zone” because only police were allowed in the area. As I was walking to the front, I felt somebody brush past me. I said to myself, Damn, that cop just punched me in the chest! The guy had on a blue jacket—blue was the color of the day for the undercover cops, so I figured he was a cop. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something and looked down to see I had a knife sticking out of my chest. By instinct, I grabbed the knife and pulled it out. When the cold air—remember, it was mid-January—hit the wound, I went down in pain. People started screaming when they saw the blood gushing out of my chest, and they yelled for an ambulance. But even though this was a potentially violent protest march and there were a couple of hundred police officers, there was no ambulance. A quick-thinking fellow protester threw me in the back of his car and said he would drive me to the hospital. One of the police captains told an officer to drive the car, and the officer responded by saying, “Wow, this is my first day on the job!”

  I thought, Not only are they killing me (I still thought it was a police officer who had stabbed me), they’re gonna give me a rookie cop! As a matter of fact, I would later file a lawsuit against the city for police negligence in allowing me to get stabbed. The case was settled out of court in 2003.

  The wound was more than three inches deep, very close to my heart, and they had to operate immediately to drain my lungs because they were filling with blood.

  As I lay there that night, I made up my mind that if I was going to die, I had no regrets about the decisions I had made. I wasn’t trying to barter with God, wasn’t saying, If you bring me through this, I’ll never do it again. No, I told myself that if I survived, I was going right back to Bensonhurst and continuing to march. And that’s what I did, after getting out of the hospital four days later.

  That’s what religion is, in my mind: living by what you say. I had faced trumped-up tax charges in the late 1980s, sixty-seven counts of tax evasion. But I never doubted that I was standing up for what I believed in, and I got acquitted on all counts. I spent ninety days in jail for protesting in Vieques, but I never regretted the decision to fly down to Puerto Rico and trespass on the Navy base where the bombing exercises were harming Puerto Rican children. I once was set up by the government, and they tried to sting me in a drug deal and then leak to the press that I was a government informant—when in actuality, they had tried to pressure me into giving them information on Don King, and I refused. Their decision to leak that false information could have gotten me killed. So I have been seriously tested in what I believe over the years. I’m not some theologian speaking about religion from on high, spouting theories on homiletics from some ivory tower. I have lived my religion down on the ground, in the streets, in hard situations, where your faith is really tested.

  My faith got another difficult test when the man who stabbed me, Michael Riccardi, went on trial. For the longest time, I tried not to think much about the incident. My attitude was, I’m glad I survived it, everything’s OK, let’s move on. But more than a year after the incident, I read in the newspaper that he was going to trial, and I got more details about this twenty-eight-year-old man’s life. He wasn’t in the mob, as we had suspected, but was just a troubled guy with an alcohol problem, who came from a family with alcohol problems. I thought about how the press was condemning this guy, this white maniac who almost killed Sharpton. And I thought to myself, Wow, how self-righteous are they? They were the ones calling me a rabble-rouser, a troublemaker, not so subtly suggesting that we would all be better off if I went away. Now they had scrambled up onto their moral high horse and were attacking Riccardi?

  In Dr. King’s writings, he talks about the ability to forgive and borrows heavily from Gandhi, and I realized that change has to begin with you—you must become the change that you seek. So one morning, it came to me: I had to forgive Riccardi. I had come to terms with my faith after the stabbing, but I had never come to terms with how I felt about this guy. So I called my attorney Michael Hardy, who is also the general counsel of NAN, and I told him to call the district attorney, because I wanted to testify at the trial of Michael Riccardi.

  I got on the stand and recounted what I remembered of that day. Then I asked the judge if I could say something to the court and to the defendant. I told the court I was amazed at how everyone was condemning him when all he did was carry out what they told him.

  “He might have hit me with the blade, but everybody put the knife in his hand,” I said.

  I told the court I would like to forgive him; I looked at him and said I wanted him to know I held no ill feelings toward him. Then I got up and left the courtroom. As soon as I had done it, I felt better. After he was convicted and they set a sentencing date, I knew my job wasn’t complete unless I went back. I told the judge I hoped the court would be lenient in the sentencing, knowing I had forgiven him. The judge, Francis X. Egitto, called my statement “noble,” but he said what Riccardi had done was “a willful act,” slipping past 200 police officers to plunge the knife into my chest, so leniency wasn’t the answer. The judge gave him five to fifteen years and said, “This violence has got to stop.”

  A short time later, I received a letter from Riccardi, which he had written to me from jail. Riccardi said, “I want you to know, Rev. Sharpton, that I grew up with alcohol problems, I had an abusive father, and it occurred to me when I sat in that Brooklyn courtroom that you were probably the first person in my life that ever stood up for me. I just want to thank you. I hope you don’t mind me writing you, and I hope your children will one day forgive me for almost killing their father.”

  The letter really moved me, so much so that I decided to visit him in jail. As you can imagine, the people around me thought I had lost my mind: “Why is he forgiving this white man? Why is he giving away a just situation, when we spend all this time fighting injustice? Isn’t this what we want?”

  Walking into that visiting room and looking eye-to-eye at the man who had tried to take me out was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—harder than recovering from the stabbing, harder than the ninety days in jail after Vieques, harder than testifying at Riccardi’s trial. I had allowed Jack Newfield, who was a columnist for the New York Post at the time and one of my biggest critics in the media, to come with me. So the two of us walked into the visiting-room cell and sat down with Riccardi. I felt that if I could pass that test, it would bring me to another level in my religious understanding. When they brought him in and he sat across from me, I searched my soul and realized I had no hate, no ill will toward him. He apologized again for stabbing me, and I told him I accepted his apology. Then he said to me, “Why do people call you anti-white? I’m a white man, and you not only went to court for me, you asked the court for leniency.”

  I said, “Every civil rights leader, every leader in my tradition, they’re going to be distorted. That’s part of the burden of leadership.”

  “Well, I just really want to thank you for what you did for me,” he said. “Even though I’m doing time, it makes me feel better knowing you forgave me a
nd I was wrong.”

  “Thank you, but I have to be honest,” I told him. “I didn’t do this for you, I did it for me. Because I had to know that I really believed what I preached. So this has nothing to do with Michael Riccardi—this has to do with Al Sharpton dealing with Al Sharpton. ’Cause I’ve said things and done things I shouldn’t have said and done. I’m not nearly as bad as the press tries to play me to be, but there are situations where I shouldn’t have gone over the line verbally or shouldn’t have tolerated others doing it in my presence. I had to do this for me.”

  That, to me, is the practice of religion. Taking that step out there on faith, even when those around you are screaming so loudly their veins are showing. Belief is when you do what may or may not be popular, but you do it because you know it’s right. When I came out for marriage equality for gays, it was right. It’s not what we preach in the Baptist church or the Pentecostal church, but it’s right. With a woman’s right to choose, I may never advise my daughters to get an abortion, but I’m not going to make them do something just because it is my will, so why would I make it unlawful for somebody else’s daughter?

  I believe strongly in my daily religious rituals. They focus me and strengthen me. The first thing I do when I get up every morning is wash my face; then I get down on my knees and pray. That’s what I grew up doing; I believe you should bow to God. Next, I read the 37th Psalm, which is my favorite Psalm, to focus me for the day. Then I read the fourth chapter of Philippians, which talks about how God will give you peace before all understanding, and that sets my tone before I go work out and read the e-mails on my BlackBerry. I say another prayer before I go to bed at night, no matter how late it happens to be, no matter where I happen to be laying my head.

  But having gone through all of that, I do not believe I have the right to impose my sincere lifelong beliefs on anybody else. There’s probably no pastor in the country who preaches more than I do—every Sunday, I’m preaching somewhere, sometimes three Sunday sermons in three different churches. I might preach in the morning in Dallas and in the evening in Indianapolis. That’s the way I always envisioned having the most impact, patterned after the approach of Dr. King and Reverend Jackson. If you pastor one church, you are talking to the same people every week; if you take the traveling-pastor approach, you can reach a different congregation every week.

  My point is that I am as solid and steadfast in my religious beliefs as any right-wing zealot or Islamic extremist. I believe it, I preach it, I live it. But I believe that my job as a preacher is to convert people, not compel them. That’s what a good preacher does: use the power of ideas, of faith, of love, to draw people to your philosophy and the vision of your savior. This idea that you have to make people follow your beliefs is not only undemocratic, it is an insult to those who really believe in God. Jesus gave people a choice, Muhammad gave people a choice, Buddha gave people a choice. There should be no religion that needs the government to force people to practice it; only the insecure and the insincere need to impose their edicts on the people. It disturbs me how steadily we all seem to be moving in that direction—nations in the Middle East requiring women to dress a certain way in order to be seen in public, states in the Bible Belt of the United States deciding that women don’t have the right to decide what they’re going to do with their own bodies or that gays don’t have the right to build families and give their partners the same legal rights over assets, resources, and estates as everyone else. And all of this done in the name of religion. To me, it is a perversion of religion. I may disagree with your choices, but I’m going to fight for you to have the choice.

  I think religion is not what you preach but what you practice. I started preaching before I could read. I’ve heard some of the greatest preachers in the world, so I’m not impressed by orators and pulpiteers. What impresses me is action, preachers whose religion compels them to action.

  My faith and my belief in what it represents sometimes has put me in opposition to other powerful preachers, proving that the practice of religion is an individual act, dictated by your own relationship with your God. In New York City, the exclusion of gays from the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade provides an annual bout of public hand-wringing and a litmus test for the city on the evolution of local politicians and religious leaders regarding the rights of gays. Every year, I would join the gay and lesbian activists who would march in protest of their exclusion. In 1998, I had occasion to come together with John Cardinal O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, for a relief effort by the religious community to benefit Haiti after a devastating hurricane. At the end of the meeting, the cardinal asked if he could speak to me privately, so we went into his office at the archdiocese on First Avenue.

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said after we sat down. “You and I have always had a respectful relationship. Anytime you wanted to meet, I’d meet you. We always were able to agree to disagree about issues where we had disagreements.”

  He reminded me of how he supported me after I got stabbed in Bensonhurst and forgave the assailant. O’Connor wrote an admiring column in the Catholic Digest about my granting of forgiveness. I wondered where he was going with this.

  He paused dramatically. “Why do you march with the gays on St. Patrick’s Day?” he asked.

  “Because I think they have a right to march on a day that honors their nationality,” I said.

  “But we’re members of the cloth. We preach that the Bible forbids it. We preach that they are going to hell.”

  “There are different interpretations of that,” I said. “But let’s say you’re right. Whether I agree with you or not, if they’re going to hell, I’m going to fight for them to have the right to get there. They have the right to choose. God gave you a right to choose with a heaven and a hell. What gives you the right to say somebody’s got to choose heaven, in your theological understanding?”

  He studied me for a moment. “I’ve never heard it put that way. Let’s just agree to disagree,” he said, rising from his chair. He extended his hand, and we shook and said good-bye.

  When I was tested after my stabbing, my faith and the daily practice of my religion led me to forgive the man who had harmed me. It was a powerful test for me, one that let me know my faith was more than an abstract idea, more than daily habits that one does without thinking. No, it was a real, living, powerful thing. God asks us to forgive others as He forgives us for our many trespasses. While it is not easy, in many ways counter to our natural human impulses, I have found that forgiveness is deeply cleansing, fortifying, even healing. And it is absolutely necessary for growth and maturity. We all hold on to things that we should let go of. You probably have something inside you now that needs to be freed, some slight or offense against you or even some major act that caused you great harm that you are clutching too close to your heart. Whom do you need to forgive?

  14

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  AT YOUR LOWEST POINT, YOU MAY FIND YOUR GREATEST GIFT

  Reaching outside the African-American community to broaden my perspective has been an important element in my transformation and growth in the past two decades as a human rights activist.

  In the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up, I was surrounded by immigrants. Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Dominicans, Nigerians, Senegalese—you couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over interesting folks, and interesting foods, from across the globe. Like everybody else in America, these people were striving to work hard, send their children to the best schools possible, and trying to grab their little piece of that elusive American dream.

  So when the issue of immigration began to emerge as an explosive political football, my thoughts would drift back to the streets of Brooklyn. These were real people—people who were a part of me. For me, it could never be them against us. My upbringing undoubtedly compelled me over the years to be naturally inclined to fight for immigrants’ rights and to try as much as possible to build coalitions between African-Americans and the imm
igrant community, understanding that our plights in America were intertwined, particularly as the government moved toward increased racial profiling to enforce its repressive immigration policies.

  Of course, for too many Americans, fed a steady stream of threatening media images, the word immigrant conjures visions of frightened Mexicans scurrying across the dusty Arizona desert, hoping to slip unseen into American society and immediately become a drain on the American pocketbook. That’s become the handy American archetype. You can hardly hear the word immigrant without first being accosted by the word illegal. In a country founded by immigrants, the ultimate irony is that America has now permanently attached the disturbing descriptor illegal to the word that defined our ancestors.

  Immigrant. It didn’t use to be a dirty word, not when the shiploads came into Ellis Island on those steamers from Europe, blessed by the words of poet Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”